Evaluating the Books I Read in 2019 for Diversity

In recent years the number of books I’ve read has dipped vastly. I used to read around 100 a year; a couple of years ago I read 35. I love books and have a houseful of them, plus loads more on my Kindle and even more on my Amazon wish list. I really want to read all my books, but I’m not going to do this if I only read 35 a year.

It’s not because I’ve lost interest but more because of the way my lifestyle has changed. I used to get public transport everywhere and I could use that time to get loads of reading done. Also books were pretty much the only thing I read.

These days I drive nearly all the time, so have lost hours each week of valuable reading time. I also read more magazines and blogs and of course there’s social media to distract me to. So I know I’m unlikely to get back to my previous reading levels but I have really tried this year.

So how many did I read?

Drum roll!!

I read 57 books.

Way off a hundred and maybe I didn’t need that drum roll, but it is a bit more than I’ve read in recent years.

I’ve always kept a record of the books I read and it’s interesting to look back over the years and see how my tastes have changed. One thing that hasn’t changed is that I like to read books about, and set in, the places I visit and by authors from those places.

Because of this, and because I read a variety of genres, I’ve kind of assumed that my reading ticks all the diversity boxes. But does it? Adventurous Kate evaluated the diversity of her reading recently and it got me wondering about my own.

So, just how diverse has my reading been this year?

Out of the 57 books I read 40 are fiction and 16 are non-fiction. I’ve also read one volume of poetry. A couple of the non-fiction books I’ve read are guide books, but I’ve counted them because they are the sort of guide books that it’s easy to read cover-to-cover rather than the dipping in sort. And I did read them cover-to-cover.

I’ve read 35 female authors and 20 male. The reason this adds up to less than 57 is because I’ve sometimes read more than one book by an individual author. (Also, some books are by more than one author which skews the figures.) Out of the female authors I read 29 fiction books and 8 non-fiction.

48 authors are white and 7 are BAME. The BAME authors are split 4:3 for fiction and non-fiction.

I read 53 books written in English and 4 that are translations, the original languages being German, Swedish, Portuguese and Indonesian. The nationalities of the authors I’ve read are predominantly British and American, though I’ve also read books by authors from Canada, Australia, Azerbaijan/Germany, Sweden, Portugal and Indonesia.

Books I’ve read have been set in, or are about, Britain (England, Scotland, Shetland, Wales), the US, Bolivia, Portugal, Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Turkey, Syria, Kuwait, Iran, the Caribbean, India, Japan, Africa (as a whole) and Namibia.

Jan Morris, author of Wales, was born a man but had a sex change in the 1970s. Apart from her I don’t know if any of the authors I’ve read are LGBT+. I also don’t know if any would identify as disabled.

So, what to make of it all?

I’ve found this a really surprising exercise. I thought I’d probably read more female than male authors which I was right about, yet the split between fiction and non-fiction is fifty-fifty. Is that because I prefer fiction by women, but don’t have a preference when it comes to non-fiction? Or because men are still seen as more serious and academic and therefore more to be trusted with non-fiction, whereas women are frivolous and so more suited to the imaginary world of fiction? Now that’s a depressing thought. Maybe I’m over-thinking this, but I will be more conscious of it in 2020.

What has really surprised me about this evaluation is that even though I’ve covered a decent range of countries in my reading, I read so few books by BAME authors and so few translations. I haven’t read much Scandi crime this year so that’s brought my translation count down, but even in years when I do read a lot of it I’ve realised I don’t read much from languages other than the Nordic ones. That’s something I can work on next year.

I’m wondering what the lack of LGBT+ and disabled authors means for my reading. As I don’t actually know how many of the authors I’ve read would consider themselves to be in either or both categories, maybe I’ve done better than I thought though I know that’s unlikely.

Is it important? Should I be reading to tick a particular box? Disabled people can write books about anything; just because they have a disability doesn’t mean they can only write about disability issues or about disabled characters. The same reasoning can be applied to LGBT+ authors.

Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, spoke about the danger of ‘the single story’ in her TED talk. How when at university in the US her professor rejected her novel because the characters were like him: they drove cars and weren’t poor. Because of this he claimed it wasn’t ‘authentically African’. If we only read what we expect authors from particular backgrounds to write about then we are buying into this single story. This is not a mistake I want to make.

Everyone needs to be able to recognise themselves in at least some of the books they read (not all, because then you’d only be reading books that acted as a mirror to your own life). It’s important to also read books with characters very different to yourself in order to learn and to be able to see life from a different perspective. So although I’ve just said authors don’t need a predictable narrative in order to be authentic, it is still important to read books that do present a different world view to one’s own; after all, getting lost in a book is often the nearest we can come to walking in someone else’s shoes.

I think my problem comes from books being niched. What is ‘other’ to some is ‘me’ to someone else. Books that are considered mainstream only identify with a very particular ‘me’. Everything else is ‘other’. I want to read books by a diverse range of authors and I want my reading to educate me on different issues. What I don’t want is to read stereotypes that sustain and reinforce the ‘single story’.

At the moment, the books marketed as mainstream are predominantly books by white, able-bodied, heterosexual men. And yes I’m including men here even though there isn’t any shortage of books written by women. Female authors are still often seen as writing for women whereas male authors are seen as universal in appealing to both genders. If you have any doubts about this then maybe ask yourself why the Harry Potter books were written by J K Rowling and not Joanne Rowling.

A study carried out in the US last year examined the pricing of over 2 million books and found that books by female authors were priced, on average, at 45% lower than those by men. That’s a massive difference. Some of the difference is explained by genre. Genres which are identified as female such as romance attract much lower prices than genres such as science which are associated more with male authors and readers. Although devaluing something because it’s seen as ‘female’ is wrong this isn’t the whole picture. The researchers found that even when they compared like with like, books by women were priced on average 9% lower than those by male writers in the same genre.

Between 2007 and 2017 in the UK less than 2% of children’s books published were by BAME writers. As the BAME population in Britain stands at around 13% this is a vast under-representation. I couldn’t find data for the percentage of authors with disabilities or who are LGBT+, but think about the books you’ve read – what was the last book you read where a key character was either gay or had a disability and the story wasn’t actually about their disability or sexuality?

I think I’ve opened a whole can of worms for myself here. I will try to read more widely from a diverse range of authors and also about issues they may face which wider society isn’t attuned to. Of course I’ll do this whilst trying not to fall for stereotypes. I don’t know if I’ll get the balance right and I don’t even know how to answer my own questions. If you have any insight I’d love to know your thoughts.

So, what did I read this year?

In case you’re interested in what the books are that I’ve read this year I listed them below. They’re in the order I wrote them down, so kind of the order I read them in though not strictly so. If you want to know which books I’m reading this year I’ve started posting them on my Facebook page.

1. The Woods by Harlan Coben
2. Scarecrow by Matthew Reilly
3. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff by Richard Carlson
4. Dead Tomorrow by Peter James
5. Behind Closed Doors by B A Paris
6. While My Eyes Were Closed by Linda Green
7. Honeymoon by Amy Jenkins
8. Book Keeping and Accounting for Your Small Business by Mike Truman
9. The Last Testament by Sam Bourne
10. Terminal by Kathy Reichs and Brendan Reichs
11. Deadline by Barbara Nadel
12. Body Count by Barbara Nadel
13. The Blood Spilt by Asa Larssson
14. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
15. Manhattan is My Beat by Jeffery Deaver
16. In Strangers’ Houses by Elizabeth Mundy
17. Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson
18. Fall Down Dead by Stephen Booth
19. The Babysitters Club #76 Stacey’s Lie by Ann M Martin
20. Past Tense by Lee Child
21. A Meditation on Murder by Robert Thorogood
22. Nine Women: Short Stories by Frances M Thompson
23. Corbyn: Against All Odds by Richard Seymour
24. A Deadly Eclair by Daryl Wood Gerber
25. Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach
26. The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths
27. No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg
28. The Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
29. Why Mummy Swears by Gill Sims
30. Geek Girl by Holly Smale
31. Traveling With God by Gonawan Mohamad
32. Destination Hay by Paul Murphy
33. Red Tape and White Knuckles by Lois Pryce
34. The Stone Circle by Elly Griffiths
35. What You Did by Claire McGowan
36. Revolutionary Ride by Lois Pryce
37. Outlander 2: A Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon
38. Outlander’s Guide to Scotland by Phoebe Taplin
39. Women Talking by Miriam Toews
40. Seven Stones to Stand or Fall by Diana Gabaldon
41. 101 Men in Kilts by Bob McDevitt
42. Around India in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh
43. The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead
44. Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
45. City of Jasmine by Olga Grjasnowa
46. Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
47. A Pocketful of Stars by Aisha Bushby
48. New Erotica for Feminists by Caitlin Kunkel, Brooke Preston, Fiona Taylor and Carrie Wittmer
49. The Three Dimensions of Freedom by Billy Bragg
50. I Have More Souls Than One by Fernando Pessoa
51. Middle, Lost, and Found by Jamie Ford
52. Geek Girl: Model Misfit by Holly Smale
53. Full Throttle: Hover Car Racer by Matthew Reilly
54. Death on a Shetland Isle by Marsali Taylor
55. The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
56. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
57. Wales by Jan Morris

Have you ever evaluated your books for diversity? Do you think reading for diversity is important? And can you help me wriggle my way out of my worm can? Share your thoughts and answers in the comments below.

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